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Traditional Animation/Transcript
Transcript Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby Tim is in his living room. He is sitting at a table, doodling a stick figure in a notepad. Moby joins him. MOBY: Beep. TIM: I'll show you. He holds his notepad up for Moby to see. Then he flips through the pages, each with a stick figure illustration, in rapid succession. The motion makes it look like the figure is running. TIM: You see? See that? MOBY: Beep. Moby hands Tim an envelope. Tim reads from the typed letter. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, how were old-school cartoons made? From, Muriel. These days, there are lots of different ways to make cartoons, but they all rely on the basic principles of traditional animation. Animation is the illusion of motion made by the movement of consecutive still images. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Ah, okay. Sorry. Let's say you want to make a cartoon of a ball bouncing. All we need to do is draw a bunch of pictures of the ball at different stages of its bouncing motion. Tim draws illustrations on consecutive pages of his notepad. TIM: We'll put a few on its downward path. Um-hmm. A few for the bounce. Um-hmm. Um-hmm. And a few on the way back up. The word "animation" appears. TIM: When these still images move by your eyes in quick succession, it seems like the ball's moving. He demonstrates by flipping the pages. TIM: Your eyes see the motion as continuous, because your brain fills in the gaps between the pictures. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Hey, good question. The stills have to move along pretty quickly, at a rate of about twelve per second before they look like more than just a series of static images. Tim repeats the demonstration. TIM: That same rule applies to live-action movies, by the way. An image shows a strip of movie film, with repeated images of a man riding a horse. TIM: In movies, the traditional film speed is twenty-four frames of film per second. The fewer frames per second, the choppier it looks. Increase the frame rate, and the motion gets smoother and more lifelike. Because animation was originally made to run through the same film projectors as live-action movies, it usually runs at twenty-four frames per second, too. The strip of film begins to move, and the man on horseback assumes motion. It speeds up and slows down. TIM: Traditional animation uses a stop-motion camera, a special type of movie camera that exposes a single frame at a time. An image shows a stop-motion camera, with a hand-control that allows it to take single-frame pictures. TIM: So the finished cartoon is actually a film of a series of pictures. The camera takes several individual shots of the cartoon character Ignatz Mouse. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Oh, right. The pictures are drawn on clear sheets of plastic, called cels. That's short for celluloid, the type of plastic cels are made of. An image shows an animator drawing a picture of Ignatz Mouse on a clear sheet of plastic or "cel." TIM: Using cels saves time, because you can draw a single background, then lay characters and other stuff over it. A background drawing is shown, then Ignatz Mouse is placed in the cel. He is carrying a red brick. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Well, as opposed to drawing every scene on paper. You sure are interrupting a lot. Anyway, you can make changes in the character's movements without having to redraw the background. One frame from a traditional cartoon is composed of several cels laid on top of each other. The stop-motion film camera takes a single shot of each frame. An image shows a stop-motion camera at work. Ignatz is replaced with another drawing of him hiding his face behind the red brick. Officer Bull Pupp is placed into the scene with him, along with a third character who is watching them. Then Ignatz is replaced with a new drawing where he is throwing the brick. TIM: That's how all animation was made in the first half of the twentieth century. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Yeah, a three-minute cartoon running at twenty-four frames per second is made of more than four thousand hand-drawn frames. It would take a team of animators months just to produce one of those. And that gets to be really expensive. An image shows over a dozen strips of film with twenty-four cels per strip. TIM: To cut costs, animators in the nineteen-sixties started using a technique called limited animation. Limited animators would put the same cel frame two, three; or four times in a row so they didn't have to draw the full twenty-four frames. An image appears showing two strips of film. The top strip is labeled "traditional animation," and the bottom strip is labeled "limited animation." TIM: It's cheaper and faster, but it can look kind of...I don't know, jerky. The images on the two strips of film begin doing jumping jacks so the viewer can compare the look of traditional animation with that of limited animation. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Well, these days computers have pretty much taken over the animation world. Digital animation doesn't require cels or cameras, so it's a lot cheaper and faster than the traditional way of animating. An image shows an animator working at his computer. TIM: Plus, you can do some pretty amazing things with computers. An animation shows a gray meteor being positioned on the computer screen. Then it turns into a bright yellow shooting star, with flames shooting out the back as it hurls through Earth’s atmosphere. TIM: Make sure you watch our Digital Animation movie to find out more. But you know, even the most advanced digital animation programs are still based on the concepts of traditional animation, at least at their core. Moby holds a notepad and a pencil. TIM: Oh, cool. You did one. MOBY: Beep. TIM: So, what have you got there? Moby shows Tim an animation of a giant Moby knocking down a skyscraper. TIM: Oh. I, I guess I should have seen that coming. Category:BrainPOP Transcripts